Mar 16
Can confirm: Touchscreen devices, even with assistive technology like screen readers, provide a terrible experience for visually impaired and other disabled folks.
I spent the last year working on accessibility for a major corporation and even though we brought things to a legally acceptable standard, it was an uphill battle and in the end, still suboptimal.
Assistive tech often transforms a 2D visual experience to a 1D linear sequence of choices, and the interface becomes tediously slow with a whole new set of multitouch swipe gestures and double taps. (Blind users often set the speaking rate for screen readers incredibly high to compensate.)
